Apostle Jonathan Voss didn’t step away from the master console.
Instead, a wild, fanatical grin split his pale face. He exposed rows of needle-sharp hunting beast teeth. His slit-pupil eyes burned with manic desperation as his webbed fingers slammed down onto the emergency blast switch.
CRACK-HSSSSSS!
The brass pulpit groaned under the impact, its internal circuit breakers flashing brilliant emerald and violet as the master override engaged.
Deep beneath the cathedral’s foundation, at minus twenty-four thousand meters below sea level, the leftover nine Seismic Cavitation Pods received their final arming command. The high-explosive hexogen-aether charges, bored deep into the land-wide crust-sink zone, blew up at the same time in an unbroken, timed together wave of ground-shaking destruction.
The physical consequences were immediate, violent, and world-ending.
Through the tuned lenses of Arthur’s Zeiss Loupe, the stress lines running through the bedrock flashed dark scarlet. The land-wide dark rock beneath the High Altar screamed with the sound of a dying continent. A jagged, twenty-yard fissure tore directly down the center of the black glass dais, splitting the polished black glass from wall to wall. Through the breach, towering geysers of white-hot overload steam and boiling dark rock magma blew up into the air, reaching heat levels in excess of eight hundred degrees.
